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Gamasutra reports that Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association conducted a study to estimate the total amount of money lost to piracy on portable game consoles. The figure they arrived at? $41.5 billion from 2004 to 2009. Quoting:
"CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found."

Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like:

1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy2) Multiple downloads by one person3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason

Also, consider the third one from the opposite perspective - people who use downloads as a means of determining if the game is worth purchasing. Maybe neither of these are a significant contributing factor (I don't know enough about Japanese culture to definitively say), but considering their method of calculating the world total is to multipl the Japanese total by 4, I'd say there are some pretty big holes in their figures anyway, unless there are studies to show that piracy levels are the same worldwide.

Consider the fourth option where these numbers are just freaking made up by people who don't care to use statistics correctly.

If, for perspective of scale, you consider that this the entire national debit of the US went up from 9 to 12 trillion USD, or 3,000 billion USD, and this claim is covers 45 billion USD, that would mean that the loss claimed by this study is 1.5% of the increase of the US national debit. And this isn't for all "content", nor all software, nor all video games, but just the _portable_ video games. And not the hardware either. Just the software part. So if we say that for every person who just has to have a DS there are 10 who had to have a PS/3, and for every one who had a PS/3, there were 10 who wanted to watch movies or use software in general, then the entire unadjusted dollar increase in the US national debit would be overshadowed by "content".

Yea, that's a "straw man" if I were going to attack it, but lets just skip that. The above was for perspective on the magnitude of the bald-face claim.

Now, when you consider everything that people can and must spend money on, "entertainment" is nothing compared to food and shelter and food and medicine and food and education and food and insurance so on. (did I mention food?) In 2007 there were 116,011,000 "households" in the us. If the US were to shoulder the burden of paying for all these "lost sales" each household would have to pony up 50 thousand ($50,000) above whatever they already spent on, well everything, including "portable games" they actually bought. That's a full working adult making a very reasonable, or even "nice" living added to each household in the US _just_ to pay for the portable game software.

Heck, there are six billion people on the planet. To recover the sales these people "lost", e.g. 45 billion just in portable gaming software, and we spread that out to every single person uniformly, regardless of their ability to own or use a portable gaming device, everybody has to go by an $8 bargain-bin super mario cartridge.

And they each have to do it while still spending 100% of the money they are already spending to live and do something other than play dominoes with their cartridge (surely there are not 6 billion used DS units available so these people can actually run the content...).

Redirecting that kind of money into the phantom sales scenario needed to back up these numbers literally flies in the face of economic reason. Food would have to come free from space aliens every day for the rest of the economy to support this pipe dream "lost sales" figure.

That is, in the same sense that "if pigs could fly, bacon would be super expensive" it may well be true that if everything these people dream of happened, and each possible download represented a lost full price sale, well then sure, with those "ifs", these numbers work. But without those preposterous ifs, the results are ridiculous.

Insupportable, criminally ridiculous claims should be met with thrown stones and brandished pitchforks. Until that happy day when people really think about what these numbers would _require_ as a founding assumption, we will be sucking swill from the teat of political fantasy.

There exists no mathematical world where the portable gaming industry could have "lost $45 billion 2010-valued-USD to piracy".

Its like asking what would happen if _you_ had all the money in the world. (hint: whatever it was you had, it would be useless). You can model and dream about the scenario all you want, but it has no foundation in possible reality.

Considering that an original PSP gets a 33% battery life boost from running a game off of the SD card rather than the craptacular UMD drive? Or the fact that you can carry all 3 of the decent games for the console on one card, and never have to worry about swapping/scratching/losing the UMD's then?

3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason

I'm kind of a subset of category 3 or maybe my own category entirely. I have a flash cart for my DS, but I've never pirated anything for it. Every game on my cart is one that I've bought and paid for legally. However, I still download the ROMs since it's far easier to do so than to dump my own cart (which AFAIK requires some kind of slot 2 device that I have no interest in buying). Really, I'm just format shifting as I find it far easier to carry around the system with one cartridge that holds my entire

To put the first two points into concrete terms: Even scrupulous non-pirates will sometimes try a game, by renting it or borrowing it from a friend, and then decide not to buy it. And before even trying a game they'll usually first read some in depth reviews to decide which games are worth it. With portable systems' games' small sizes, and big cheap flash memories, will the pirates pick and choose too, or will they just download every game?

Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like:
1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy

This is probably the biggest of the bunch...personally, and I know a few similar like-minded people, if I could snag half the games I wanted at no cost, I'd have more games than I would know what to do with. Real world, though, I'll go and buy the best of the ones I want, based on what others tell me of them, and either ignore the rest or wait until they're on some sort of clearance/resale rack at low cost (where the game manufacturers are realising no to low profit on it).

These studies never count sales that never happened because casual gamers won't spend the money for a console (or portable) if the cost of games is prohibitive. I never bought any X Box or Playstation games simply because of the cost of the console and a dozen games.

Way back in DOS days I bought a PC because stuff could be copied and thus affordable to experiment with the large world of software. I had tons of shareware, etc. If all software was locked down at over $40/title, my PC purchase would have been delayed for years. There is only just not that much interest in playing with DOS for DOS sake.

Games are always priced for the maximum profit (free market) by artificial scaracity. Only the more hard core gamers buy them. Many potential game buyers play freecell and minesweeper along with free online services such as Farmville, neopets, etc., and are content. Seriousely, if Farmville required a pre-play purchase of $40, do you think it would have any traction? Many games that are pirated enjoy this same publicity that the game is good. Some games locked down, don't get much exposure because it is reviewed as broken, slow, hard to make work.

I doubt that game manufactures are interested in attracting the Farmville players to a play platform at prices they would buy a good game. Wii has done a fair job at attracting players that normally won't buy a console.

However, since only two days ago, Sony announced they have sold a total of 50 million PSPs, that's the real population we should be looking at.

Let's assume that every PSP has been modded. And that nobody has bought two (which, given I'm the only person I know who didn't replace a 1st-gen with a smaller, better one, is obviously wrong). That's nearly a grand's worth of piracy each.

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10. And haven't many studies already shown (well, at least with music) that the people who pirate are also the people who buy the most?

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10.

On a wide scope, I can wholly agree with this statement; when you look at piracy on the whole, a good part of it (and probably most appreciably with music) is people wanting to sample before they plop down some cash on the real deal.

In a single incident, however, I can see the legitimacy of the IP holders' argument; if person A downloads item X, and subsequently persons B through F snatch that item from person A, its not an unreasonable conclusion to say that person A potentially caused five lost sales to

if person A downloads item X, and subsequently persons B through F snatch that item from person A, its not an unreasonable conclusion to say that person A potentially caused five lost sales to the company

But it is an unreasonable conclusion. It presupposes that the same number of people will pay for something as will accept it for free. In short, it supposes that the Law of Demand [wikipedia.org] does not apply.

No, just you didn't understand my post. Their figures are based on the presumption that everyone who "bought" a copy at $0 would also have bought a copy at $60 (or whatever they charge). This denies the law of demand. Therefore you are plainly wrong.

A study is just a variant on the good old fashioned scientific experiment where you start with a hypothesis, devise some method to determine whether or not your hypothesis is correct, carry out this method and draw conclusions based on the results. The only difference is that many of these studies are operated backwards - you decide what you wish to conclude, invent results which support these conclusions and devise a method which could reasonably produce such results.

It may be possible to quantify piracy but I'm quite sure the numbers being banded around right now are complete garbage, if only because if you believe them you also have to believe that the GDP of the planet would double overnight if you were to eliminate it.

Either that or that many people lacking sufficient disposable income, if forced somehow to buy legit copies of all media, would shift the money they spend on food and housing toward that.
Dream on, IP holders.

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10. And haven't many studies already shown (well, at least with music) that the people who pirate are also the people who buy the most?

Compare it to free newspapers.Taking a train or bus, I sometimes get up to 3 free newspapers. Does that mean that the newspapers lose out 3 sales each day? NO.

The same goes for all the streaming stuff I watch on the internet (some series and perhaps a movie). Would I buy the whole lot if it wasn't available for free? NO.

The same again for the mp3's I deny to have. No way that I will pay up to 1 euro for 1 song. With the amount of music I deny to have, that would be absolutely unaffordable. If there was not

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

You are such a cynical, suspicious person! It must feel so awful living inside your head. You probably aren't even able to form meaningful bonds with other people.

No, I'm sure this figure is completely accurate. After all, who knows an industry better than the people who work in it? These numbers should be every bit as accurate as BP's risk assessment for deep water drilling.

I don't care what the publishers say, a pirated game is not necessarily a lost sale, quite the contrary, I've found most pirates to be lazy bastards who wont pay for anything if they can help it. When one of those types pirates it's just a copy in circulation that shouldn't exist.

On the other hand, there is a type of piracy that is a lost sale. I still love the Gameboy Advanced system, and of course they no longer make games for it, so I turn to eBay and the like. More than once I've gotten outright pirated cartridges off of eBay. I always make sure the sellers have some history to prevent that, but occasionally one slips through. Some of the pirated games I've gotten off of there were really high quality, I spotted the fakes, but I don't think most people would have. On more than one occasion the seller disappeared while my game was in transit, when they don't disappear I tattle to eBay. I then have a moral dillema of what to do with said pirated copy. I paid for it, I didn't know it was pirated until it got here, but it is pirated... Hurricane Ike settled that for me on my older cartridges, but I actually did get a pirate cart off of Amazon since then.

I'm of the opinion the MPAA and the RIAA need to police flea markets and sellers like the above, go after file sharers, but leave downloaders alone. The video game guys need to do the same thing. The big difference between the movie and music people and the video game people is when a new format comes out movies and music usually transition to it. Not until recently have classics been commonly re-released on newer systems and they still don't re-release all of them legally.

On the other hand, there is a type of piracy that is a lost sale. I still love the Gameboy Advanced system, and of course they no longer make games for it, so I turn to eBay and the like. More than once I've gotten outright pirated cartridges off of eBay.

Buying (legit) GBA cartridges second-hand on eBay doesn't put any money into Nintendo's hands, so where does the "lost sale" argument come from? Yes, I understand that you would have otherwise gotten a legit copy, but the whole smarmy justification for attacking piracy is that the game companies and such lose money from it. If they wouldn't have gained a cent even if you'd bought a legit copy, the situation doesn't apply.

Of course, I also believe that if a copyrighted work is not being made commercially available, there should be no penalty for distributing it.

The GP is talking about actual piracy of GBA games, i.e. bootleg cartridges manufactured by unauthorized/unlicensed agencies, sold at rates lower than retail, of which the copyright owners get nothing.

If the copyright owner is not selling his work in the first place, there is no lost sale. Game Boy Advance games are not being sold by Nintendo anymore; therefore, buying an unauthorized copy of a GBA game does not translate to any sort of loss on Nintendo's part because he couldn't have bought a legit copy o

Yeah, on one occasion one of the sellers was listed as being in New England, and the game was new in box, sometimes retailers have leftovers or one turns up. I get a package from Hong Kong a week later with a never been popped out flat box and a cart that looks legit, but on further examination wasn't. In this case it would have been a new sale, even though it would have been old stock.

That's how the second hand market works. At some point Nintendo was paid for the copy of whatever it is you just bought. Whereas with a pirated cart, they never were. Ultimately, since infringement requires intent, and one intended to buy a legit second hand copy, I doubt very much that there's anything that Nintendo could do in this situation about it. Well other than make your life a living hell by filing a bad lawsuit.

Agreed - the people selling copies of games are the real pirates who are stealing sales and money from the industry. Most serial downloaders are either people who are already spending a large portion of their income on games and couldn't afford to spend more, or their people who never had any intention of buying even if they couldn't get it for free. There's also a not-insignificant subset of those people who are just serial hoarders, I've known people who have literally thousands of downloaded games or music or movies and haven't "consumed" even 5% of them, they just like to be able to boast or take pride in the completeness of their collection. They'd have to take out a mortgage to afford to actually buy all those things, it's ridiculous to assume they're all lost sales, and these people must make up a hefty chunk of the "piracy" figures.

I've bought tons of media and not gotten to it until much later. I've been working my way through all the Final Fantasy games in order. I finished Final Fantasy IV three days ago, I went to retrieve my copy of V, which I know I bought in anticipation of getting there. I couldn't find it. I realized I must have lost it in Hurricane Ike - that was in in 08, that's some for sight lost. I've bought DVDs and finally gotten a chance to watch them a year later, I do the same with bo

I agree with many aspects of what you say. I too have been the unwitting recipient of pirated items from ebay and even once from amazon too. Unfortunately.

Also, you have to consider the fact that many countries actually ALLOW for a copy to be made (but not sold) of the stuff you buy. Many artists, and IP holders recignize that fact, and I even remember a couple of musicians getting pissed that their fans got sued for piracy, when in fact they felt that it was the people profiting from the piracy that should

Then you have people like me who use tons of pirate utils but stay legal. I rip every PSX and UMD game I own and put them on my MS Pro-Duo cards in my hacked PSP. Not one of the PSX or PSP games is pirated. I buy CDs and rip them, it's actually cheaper than buying downloads for.99 each, especially if you go the still legal used route. I even rip my own kids DVDs to put them on her netbook. Really, you don't want kids handling optical media if you can avoid it. I consider "Digital Copy" a joke. All D

Exactly. People buy games for their Linux, Mac, Windows, "other" devices because they feel like they are getting value, long term or short.
See the download segment as externally hosted demos or a brand building exercise.
Over time they may buy, until then focus on the people who matter and real marketing.

Based on your use of commas where Americans would use periods and your trailing instead of leading dollar sign I'm assuming you're European. Since you say you feel entitled I strongly suspect so. I really don't like the entitlement mindset. If we want these people to keep making games, movies, and music we need to make sure they profited some how. I've had people argue that I'm just as bad as a pirate because I buy used, but I disagree, I'm paying attention to the first sale doctrine. The license follo

No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products. This is the broken window fallacy, that a child who throws a rock through a window is stimulating the economy.

I download movies and tv shows because I don't like watching broadcast TV. Any that deserve a repeat viewing get bought on DVD (which is probably about 80%). If they shutdown illegal downloads they wouldn't get more money from me because I have little to spare, they are more likely to get less as I would just shift to other forms of entertainment or free to access media (I have started watching local legal tv streaming sites, which has dropped the amount I illegally download and later purchase).

This isn't the 1990's where the big publishers had little competition. There is so much free or cheap content out there that I don't buy before I try.

I don't think it's a broken window fallacy, because they aren't suggesting that we break anything. I think the idea is that they invested money in creating these things, but people didn't buy them, so they won't be able to invest as much in creating future products. If anything, they're arguing for a centrally-planned economy, where the big boys decide what we should be buying, create it, then demand that we buy it or else.

Yes it is. The broken window fallacy is the mistaken belief that spent money comes out of thin air. John Stossel has a great video [youtube.com] on it. He's talking about government spending, but you can replace "government" with "consumer" and get the same idea.

The generally-correct idea is that a lost sale for one industry is a gained sale for another, so pointing out lost sale figures is useless. As stated in the topic, it's a zero-sum game.

I download movies and tv shows because I don't like watching broadcast TV. Any that deserve a repeat viewing get bought on DVD (which is probably about 80%)

Shows which I first watched online through unlicensed channels, the result of which being me purchasing a DVD:

- Lost (Series 1 - 3, I regret this now but I really enjoyed series 1)
- Fringe (Series 1, I'm told it's going the way of Lost so I might watch the next one online and see if it's good)
- House (Series 1 - 5. Amazing show)
- Futurama (Series 1 - 4)
- Prison Break (Series 1 - 3, will get 4 when I see it)
- Heroes (Series 1 and 2, watched 3 on iPlayer, may get 4).

No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products.

It is actually a whole lot less meaningful than that. I used to pirate... when I was 12. Did I cost someone riches whenever I did this? Hell no! A game not pirated was simply a game never owned. I just didn't have any money. No one lost anything when I pirated because I had no money for the video game (or any industry) to lose. When someone with no money to spend pirates, the economy loses exactly zero.

Contrast this with today. I make money. I am a single engineer who living like a monk who makes m

Considering the ESA claims the whole industry was worth $11.7 billion [theesa.com] in 2008, and that was 22.9% growth form the year before, this does not seem to be a very plausible number, since it nearly amounts to the sum of the value of the whole industry over the five years of this "study".

Particularly for handheld games - They are immensely popular in Japan largely due to the excess of mass transit and lack of personal-owned cars, and while they SEEM to be decently popular around here, I wouldn't be surprised if the total sales in Japan actually exceed those of US titles on handheld consoles, despite the massive different in population.

For handheld consoles I can see it being true, but just saying "software market" is too ambiguous even in an article about game piracy.

I didn't know that Japan had twice the population of the UK (where I am) until right now, that is interesting and makes the 25% figure seem somewhat less ludicrous when just talking about the handheld games market.

By the same argument, I'm almost 100% sure the industry lose a lot more potential profit from second hand sales and/or rentals, since without them, technically people would have bought the games first-hand... right?

You can't prove that a pirate was willing to buy a game so you can't prove you actually lost anything, but Gamestop flaunts their second hand sales to their stockholders, so you know exactly how much people were willing to pay. But now instead of the publishers getting money and making more games, it goes to Gamestop so they can make more...money.

Interestingly, it also shows the price point people are willing to buy games. I don't know what is the usual price second-hand sales are usually sold at (being in one of those countries which does NOT have a significant second hand sale market), but I'd think publishers would have a lot more profit selling goods at 2nd hand prices.

Of cause there's the point of packaging, but that's what online distribution is for.

Notice how *some* people will get utterly smashed when attending an event with an open bar? They're quite eager to consume far more than they might usually have...

Exactly, and the same concepts should be applied to this 'study'. When you have to pay for something, your not as likely to get everything you want. But when its free, hey why not? Not like you paid for it. Like free samples in a store, everyone want one because they are free, not because of what they are.

Don't they ever get tired of throwing these numbers around? And do anyone believe them?

If those numbers were even close to be real they would have managed to stop piracy long ago. I mean, who in their right mind will sit and idly watching billion after billion trickling out of their wallet and all they manage to come up with is some bizarre DRM schemes that never works. One would think that with such amount of money involved investing more in stopping piracy should be well worth it. Say a billion dollars

From my teens through my 20's I was a profligate game pirate and I still have stacks of burnt CDs of late 90's and early 00's titles that I dig through every once in awhile. It is nice to be able to play Master of Orion or the original Fable for a sense of nostalgia but now in my early 30's I've begun thinking longer term storage and instead of trying to roll my own I'm going to trust Steam so I can play the few new games I play each year in the old folks home. Until I can get a nice Raid + backup solution for 10-20 terrabytes of games and growing, Steam or something like it seems the way to go.

So buy at the stupidly reduced weekend sale rates. The original L4D sold at a two thousand percent higher rate when price was reduced by 80%, resulting in 4x as much profit (by my back of the napkin maths, in a perfect universe of no ISP fees etc). Who pays full price nowerdays anyway?

I was shocked this morning to read that Foxconn employees are paid 113 euros per month.

It might seem irrelevant to this discussion, but it is not: the global elite is pushing for bigger profits, either through studies that claim loss from piracy or from other means.

I hope/. readers don't get the bait that the global elite ix losing any money. They don't; they are filthy rich as a result of exploiting people in 3rd world countries. Don't make them a favor and think that piracy hurts them; it does not. It simply doesn't make their wallets extra-ultra-humongously fat.

I wouldn't have bought four Nintendo DS's if I hadn't been able to get a device that let me run anything I wanted on the things.I also feel no remorse at all in showing small children how to circumvent copyright on those devices.

Because if they were true, then ipso facto, we be wrong. Since that's unpossible, the figures must be a filthy lie. So-called facts must not be allowed to interfere with our principled objection to rewarding creators for their work. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I wrote a really good version of Hello World 2.0, it was so great in fact that i tried to market it as really fucking expensive enterprise version of hello world; I put the price at $80 billion billion.
Despite the excellent software quality no one bought it, but as my sister pirated it to see what i was raving about i've suffered losses of more than the entire earth GDP of the last 20 milennia or so. And you dare to say software piracy is okay!

DRM, DRM, DRM, DRM i will NEVER buy a DRM protected game. Will they work in 10 years? 20, 30, 40?Constant internet connection is required to play Ubisoft games, c'mon... Will their servers be up and running forever?

Windows... Microsoft breaks your games every few years by releasing a new version of winbl0wz which does not include the library runtimes required to run old games.

Signup required to play the game.I do have a few retail games.Half-life 2 is an good example, i bougt the game when it came out a few years back, i'm unable to play it today... why? Because in order to play the game (in singleplayer) you must install STEAM and assign the game to your steam profile, right? Install steam, choose user\pass and check the remember me box. Now 6 years later I have a new email account and i forgot my steam user\pass. I contacted STEAM and they are unwilling to help me. THEY stole MY game.I've also forgot my password for Red Alert 3, so i cannot play it online.A few weeks ago when i wanted to play half-life 2 i had to DOWNLOAD A PIRATE COPY in order to workaround my forgotten user\pass problem.

It's more easy to install and play pirated games.

It's more easy to watch pirated movies, no IF YOU STEAL YOU GOTO JAIL warnings followed by 10 minutes of trailers.

You've kind of missed the point entirely, most of the people who pirate games can't afford to buy all of the games they pirate, so they never would have bought all the games they pirated. However, if these pirates interact with people who are not pirates and talk about the games they pirated and liked, they are providing free advertising.

As the iPhone study showed about 10% of iPhone owners were responsible for over 90% piracy rates on games. That means the 10% of pirates go through games voraciously, at a rate far, far beyond what non-pirates do. This means any comparison between piracy rates and money lost is going be vastly overstated.

The true cost of piracy would probably be better estimated by figuring the average purchase rate for game players and then multiplying that by the percentage of people who pirate games. It gives much lower but more accurate and realistic numbers.

When I was a teenager I had friends that had hundreds of games for their Commodore 64.I ask one of them if they had played all of them.He told me he barely played any and that he spent most of his computer time copying the games themselves.That's when I realized that for some, copying games is "The Game". Collecting them, sorting them in alphabetical order, showing them off to your friends, trading with your friends and strangers, talking about the difficulty of copying some games. Nobody would pay for any of this but just "having them" was the thrill. The fact that it was "bad to copy" just adds to it.

In the end it's like pokemon: Gotta catch 'em all.

The companies should worry more about the guys who only copy one or 2 games and play the FSCK out of them. THOSE are the REAL lost sales.

According to Wikipedia there's 129M DS units sold, and 60M PSP units sold.. that's $220 worth of pirated games for every handheld in the world. Keeping in mind that a lot of people bought multiple revisions of the DS, replacement units, units that aren't in use, and so on, it's probably more like $300-400 per handheld owner.

Sorry, but that number is completely ridiculous and not credible in any way whatsoever to anyone owning a calculator.

Not really, you'll have a small subsection of players who have $1-3k+ at retail price worth of pirate DS software (and the study assumes absolutely anything pirated is a lost sale), and others with none at all. Usually people who pirate games for a portable will fill up the largest microSD card they can lay their hands on with anything that looks remotely decent. 8GB is a *lot* of DS games.

That's probably true if you get games one at a time, but the only time I've seen a pirated game on a DS was when it was loaded onto a flash card, with around 40 other titles. Unless DS games are $10 each, $400 per cartridge is hardly pushing it.

I agree that it won't be per owner of the device, but just putting an relevant figure out there based on my own experience.

I'm sure the heavy pirates have many thousands of dollars worth of pirated games, which might actually average out to $220 per handheld. But there's no way those pirates would have bought a significant portion of those games had they not been available for free, and that's why their $41 billion is accurate but ultimately quite meaningless.

I think most slashdotters are in complete denial about how massive it is. ... or not. I don't pirate stuff, nor to I know anyone who does. I used to pirate stuff when I wass much younger, and I knew people who pirated stuff when they were students. Now I and the people I spend much of my time with are older none of us pirate any more.

But I do pirate and I do buy. So where does that fit? I don't buy from companies that screw me anymore. EA, die already. Bethseda, get stuffed with your horse armor that needs a credit card. Turbine/Code Masters, same thing (latest Lotro expansion).

Sometimes I make an exception, for Bioware but I pirated Mass Effect 2 because the DLC for Dragon Age sucked donkey balls (which I did buy).

Frankly the game industry has managed to make piracy the only way to tell them that you don't like their business practic